I’m currently traveling around the country and am always on the lookout for likely metal detecting sites. I found an old railway station in Victoria which is no longer active, the station itself is gone and the railway is now a walking/riding path. Looking at old photos of the station I headed into the scrub where the old station masters house was with the X-Terra 705.
Found mostly old junk with a couple buttons and a harmonica around the old house with a lot of broken old bottles and pottery. Moving along what looked like an old path I picked up my first coin, a 1925 halfpenny.
A few meters away I picked up another coin, this time a 1916 halfpenny.
I kept detecting along the path and got a nice solid 42 just under some bushes. I saw the Gothic markings on the coin as it came up out of the sand and knew I had something very nice. This would have to be my favourite find so far in my metal detecting career, an 1880 Gothic florin. I wrote about these coins in one of my Rare Coins of Australia History blog posts.
The florin date is on the obverse, here it is the last four letters on the right side (lxxx = 80).
I went over the area quite well hoping for another nice fine but I picked up only one more coin, an 1877 sixpence. Not a bad coin either to be fair.
All up it was a good day out with a few nice pre-decimals and my first ever Gothic florin find. The area was quite overgrown so a lot of it was impossible to detect, I’ll head back one day and try my luck there again.